Massage image and reality in San Gabriel: Editorial

Massage establishments on Valley Boulevard in San Gabriel. City of San Gabriel received a report on massage establishments and there are 52 of them in the small city Thursday, November 7, 2013. Photo by Walt Mancini/Pasadena Star-News)

It’s unlikely that anyone hankers for a business to move into their neighborhood that might be a front for prostitution — unless they’re in the madam business themselves.

And massage parlors, it is said, have been known — along with the many therapeutic ones around Southern California — to be fronts for prostitution.

But what is going on in four-square-mile San Gabriel as its citizens grapple with the fact that their proud little city is home to 53 massage parlors is much more complicated than that, even.

Almost all of the massage parlors are owned and operated by immigrant Asian families. San Gabriel is a city that was formerly almost entirely white and Latino. It’s home to the Spanish mission that was one of the first outposts of European civilization in Southern California. The city has in the last 20 years has become majority Asian in population — at the 2010 Census, over 60 percent, a jump from 48 percent in 2000. Two of the five members of the City Council are of Asian descent. As with so much of the San Gabriel Valley, its state senator, its Assembly member and its congressional representative are of Chinese descent. The San Gabriel Square mall shopping and dining area is acclaimed as a “Chinese Disneyland,” an evening and weekend mecca for tourists and locals alike.

The reason massage parlor owners say that there is such a proliferation of the businesses is simple: there is demand for massages from the public, and there are few economic barriers to opening a massage business. Unlike opening up a restaurant, say, or a grocery store — most any other business, really — very little capital needs to be invested in inventory or equipment. A storefront, massage beds and employees with really good hands and some stamina — that’s about it.

To longtime residents of San Gabriel, however, it’s been a bit unsettling to find that fully 27 massage parlors are now on one stretch of the main commercial street, Valley Boulevard. These are places that once were hardware stores and bakeries. That’s a change.

It does not racialize the situation to note that most of the people who recently have been coming to City Council meetings to complain about massage parlors are longtime white and Latino residents. This is a culture clash. And there is more of a culture of massage therapy in many Asian nations, from acupressure to traditional foot massage to shiatsu.

There are also clear parallels to the outrage and suspicion in Temple City decades ago when suddenly there was a proliferation of Asian-owned bridal shops in town. “Fronts for prostitution!” cried some. Actually, they were just places to buy a wedding gown.

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But too much of anything can be, for a small city, simply too much. Citizens and City Hall have an interest in promoting a diverse economy. San Gabriel is right to have created a special team aimed at enforcing a 2-year-old city law that requires massage establishments to get a business license and requires any masseuse to have a license from the California Massage Therapy Council. So far, police say they have little proof of prostitution in massage parlors. Interestingly, the city’s code enforcement manager says that there are actually more brothels in residential neighborhoods than in the businesses with signs out front.

But if there’s a perception of becoming a red-light district, the concerted effort at enforcing the law must be kept up.